Managing Diversity to Manage Technological Transition (Miya Kohno, Toshiya Asaba, Fred Baker)
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Technological transition is one of the hardest questions in architectural studies. This paper examines how technological transitions take place in the Internet. In the first half of this paper, we sort out the patterns of technological transition in the networking industry, and hypothesize that diversity is requisite to cope with an “unplanned” technological transition. At the same time, however, excessive diversity would be harmful since it could cause chaos or uncontrollability. In the latter half, we measure some diversity trends of Internet Architecture, and observe a phase mismatch between layers. One can assume that such a phase mismatch helps to avoid excessive diversity as a whole, and helps the sustainability and evolvability of the Internet.